The Word House will host a grand opening celebration December 9 in the Carpet Depot Building at 25 Kings Highway in Winona Lake, Ind. Ink Free News reported that last January, owner Sarah Wordhouse "moved to Winona Lake from Michigan after graduating with a degree in professional writing and spending time as an editor at Taylor University and Bettie's Pages, an indie bookstore. She visited friends here and loved how 'it was such an amazingly walkable city.' The rest is history."
Wordhouse said she grew up with books, and her mother always told her "the most important thing you can learn to do is to read. If you can read, you can do anything.... I knew I had a good last name by the time I was 10 or 11. I had gone to a Writers' Camp and one of the teachers told me that no matter what, I just had to keep my name!"
She had intended to open a bookstore "someday as a retirement plan actually, but things just worked out sooner, a lot sooner," Wordhouse noted. "I tell people to come hang out! Students ask me if they can come do homework, and I say absolutely. The bookstore clearly welcomes people to come and stay with comfy couches and reading lamps.... I believe that you have to make things be what you want. The first step for me was to make a bookstore that I myself would want to shop at."